Exploiting the effect of noise on a chemical system to obtain logic gates

Small added noise has been predicted to direct certain classes of chemical systems towards a specific enantiomeric direction, with the dependence of product asymmetry on noise levels being non-monotonic and nonlinear. Associating the product selection in such chemical reactions with different outputs, and varying noise levels to encode the inputs, we observe that the response of the system mirrors the input-output relations of different fundamental logic operations. So the complex enantioselection, under the influence of noise, allows the chemical system to effectively behave as a logic gate. This observation may have potential applications in the design of chemical gates, as well as provide understanding of the information processing capacity of naturally occurring chiral symmetry-breaking chemical systems, with noise acting as the logic pattern selector. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2009